E.J. Dionne Jr.: What Real Conservatism is All About
Every nation needs an intelligent and constructive form of conservatism. The debate over the health care bill, which mercifully came to a close on Sunday night, was not American conservatism's finest hour.
In its current incarnation, conservatism has taken on an angry crankiness. It is caught up in a pseudo-populism that true conservatism should mistrust -- what on Earth would Bill Buckley have made of "death panels"? The creed is caught up in a suspicion of all reform that conservatives of the Edmund Burke stripe have always warned against.
Authentic conservatism is better than this....
It's worth remembering that not only did Hitler's staunch opponents include the German left, but also, as the historian John Lukacs has insisted, conservative traditionalists horrified by the ways in which the Nazis were ripping apart German society and how they were treating other human beings.
Related to this is [another] great contribution of conservatism: a suspicion of human nature and a belief that humans cannot be remolded like plastic. Conservatives see a fallen side of human nature usually described in terms of original sin. And when utopians propose to create a New Man or a New Woman, the conservative typically cries: Stop!
From generation to generation, human nature doesn't really change....
A society that fails to keep these conservative warnings in mind is likely to run into trouble. Yet our current forms of conservatism seem thoroughly un-conservative or, as Peter Viereck put it in the 1950s, "pseudo-conservative," which is an ally of pseudo-populism....
Many who call themselves conservatives propose to cast aside even government programs that have stood the test of time. They seem to imagine a world in which government withers away, a phrase that comes from Friedrich Engels, not Buckley. Or they tie themselves up in unruly contradictions, declaring simultaneously that they are dead-set against government-run health care and passionate defenders of Medicare.
And while modern conservatism has usually supported the market against the state, its oldest and most durable brand understood that the market was an imperfect instrument. True conservatives may give "two cheers for capitalism," as Irving Kristol put it in the title of one of his books, but never three....